Category Archives: academia

My academic pursuits – from undergraduate, to postgraduate, and beyond.

Why I’m desperate for a grown up job.

22 Replies

I have been working exclusively from home since the end of 2011.

“That’s awesome,” I hear you all say. “You’re so lucky! The freedom! The flexibility! The pyjamas!“

Not so, internet friends.

It is officially unhealthy for me to live, study, and work at home. At first, of course, I loved it. If I’m honest, for the first year I loved it.

Lately, though, I’ve been feeling a pull back to the Real World – a world in which I have to wake up at a particular time and get dressed into something other than a clean pair of PJ pants, in which I can’t schedule lunches with friends that turn into ridiculous five-hour-long drinking sessions (to be fair, though, I haven’t done that in many years), in which I have to uphold a certain level of acceptable appearance.

Basically, internet, I feeling uuuuugly.

I’m not one to give too much of a shit about the way that I look. I’m not precious about anything, really. I’ve had exactly two manicures in my life, and they were both in Bali last month. I’ve had my hair dyed in a salon once, and I haven’t dyed it at all this year, despite the increasing wash of greys at my temple. (And I wonder why I think I look old…)

My eyebrows are six-months unplucked (although, thankfully, ten years of over-plucking mean that I’m not growing a sexy monobrow… yet), I haven’t had a shower yet today and it’s 4pm (true story), and I’m wearing an outfit that could really only be described as stay-at-home-mum chic… Except I’m not running around after toddlers all day. I’m not running around after anything, in fact, and that’s why I’ve managed to acquire myself a casual 10 extra kilos this year.

Another true story.

wpid-20130509_160001.jpg

 

don’t worry. this makes me just as embarrassed as it makes you.

The thing is, it’s not a matter of me being lazy or anything. I’m not lazy. I have most of a PhD written, and multiple jobs. It’s just that none of these things require me to leave my house, and I am going bonkers. It’s taking every fibre of my being to stop myself from spending my days lurking job boards looking for the job of my dreams*.

*Note that ‘job of my dreams’ doesn’t actually involve having a conventional job at all. If it were possible I’d just make traveling and writing my profession, but not yet, young ones. Not yet.

It all returns to that stinking, rotten ol’ chestnut of my thesis, though, doesn’t it? Once that’s done I can Do Other Things in the Real World with Actual People (caps necessary).

And perhaps then I’ll be motivated to do other things, too. Like fix up my hair, and shower before midday, and spend time being active with other human beings, and wear something without an elasticated waist. Maybe.

(Who even am I?)

The past couple of weeks.

2 Replies

Momentum.

It’s all about just keeping on going because I have to keep on going.

I don’t even remember what I last wrote about here or when it was, but it was probably a couple of weeks ago and it was probably about music.

(I checked – it was and it was.)

Since then I went to Melbourne, again, this time to see Tool.

They were very good, as they have been every other time I’ve seen them. How come things I like don’t happen in the city in which I live?

(The answer is that I don’t live in a very good city. A pretty city, for sure, and a city that is finding its cultural feet, but not a city in which many things I like regularly happen.)

Going to Melbourne is getting expensive, but as with every other time that I’ve been since 2010, this trip made me feel torn between urgently needing to move there right this very second and not being sure that it’s where I want to live next.

I don’t have any photos of Tool’s show, because curiously eagle-eyed ushers were shining their little torches in the eyes of anyone who dared to take a shitty iPhone photo of the gig. Seriously, they were all over photo offenders. I was sitting in the nosebleeds so it would’ve been a photo of pretty much nothing anyway, and my phone battery had died, but rest assured that the show was A. May. Zing. Well, the second half. My stupid, still perforated eardrum was bothering me during the first half. At least the visuals were predictably mind-blowing, and I’m pretty sure the entire audience experienced a collective spiritual awakening during Stinkfist. Maybe that’s a bit naff to say, but seriously? It went off, and was made extra special by the fact that the guy sitting in front of me was engaging in some spectacularly dysrhythmic air drumming and clapping during the song.

I also want to know what it costs to ship a two-metre diameter mirror ball across the world for one song. And, I want to know who, in the tour planning meeting, was responsible for the revelation that what Tool’s live show needed was a glitter bomb.

20130426_111805

coffee from melbourne’s brilliant seven seeds, served with just the right amount of hipster wank.
20130426_172411

a wall made of beer cartons at mountain goat brewery.

Other than go see Tool, my travel buddy and I drank coffee, ate (not too much) food — we learned our lesson about overeating last November when we went to Melbourne and each gained about 3kg, and drank ALL THE BEER.

It was grand.

Now I’m home and it’s been a hectic week full of meetings and Skypings and my dad having a double knee replacement, which is cool because now I have a cyborg father (or did I already? What would Haraway say?), but less cool because I imagine it’s pretty painful “having another man’s knees” put inside your legs. (He knows he doesn’t have another man’s knees, don’t worry.) The doctor did not approve Dad’s request to be able to take home his old knees for the dogs to have.

An advantage of Dad having surgery was that it gave Sisterface a good excuse to come up for a few nights, and we reacquainted ourselves with the gym. I haven’t regularly been to the gym in an embarrasingly long time, but I went twice this week, so I’m super proud of myself.

Now it’s the weekend and I’m just gliding trundling along on the momentum of a month and a half in which I feel that I’ve never been at home, and have so much that needs to be done. There has been no time for serious blogging or discussing-of-issues. I’ve even been letting myself go more than 24 hours between checking Twitter, which is unheard of for me, because I don’t have time to consider all the good stuff that the Intarwebz put out on a daily basis.

I also don’t have Internet at home yet. Soon, they say. Next week, they say.

Which is why I find myself back at Mum & Dad’s on a Saturday night, using their connection and writing a long rambling post about god knows what for god knows what reason, whilst reading terrible early iterations of my thesis introduction and taking photos of myself to admire how bonkers my hair is looking lately.

20130504_202949

you can’t tell, but hair = bonkers. word to the wise: dreadlocks are easily the most high-maintenance hairstyle ever. who knew?

But on that note, I should probably get back to work.

[If you have a minute or two, by the way, please sign this petition to save the Internet Communications degree at Curtin Uni. I'm doing my PhD in the Net Studies department, and have been teaching the Net Comms course for 5 years. Currently I'm only teaching the online version through Open Universities Australia, but I've taught on campus many times, and it's a truly shitty thing to see my department struggling. Please, #savenetstudies! More about this later]

20130504_203021bonus shot of me trying to reduce my between-eyebrow wrinkles. it only kind of worked, and instead i just have a furrowed brow. my thesis is making me look very old.

Late night study tunes: edn. XIV (afternoon edition II)

2 Replies

I’m going to have to think of something to rename this section in a couple of months, as I will no longer be studying!

In the mean time, though, this is the first Late Night Study Tunes post from my new apartment (!!). My selection of music is still a bit limited here, as I don’t really have Internet yet.

I mean, I do have internet (because I’d die without it), but uni is paying for it, and I get the feeling they don’t want me streaming hour after hour of music from Spotify, which is what I’ve used to listen to music since my laptop died last year. Although I did transfer over my library to my new computer (which is still at my parents’ house as it’s too big for my apartment), I decided it was time to break up with iTunes, and I haven’t been able to find a suitable replacement that works well with an Apple computer and a Samsung phone… especially seeing as my iMac steadfastly refuses to recognise my phone as a device (a known fault between iMacs & the Samsung Galaxy Note II — one that I wish I’d known about in advance!).

So. I have the music on my iPad, which hasn’t been updated since June 2012, and the 30 or so albums I’ve put on to my phone. Slim pickings for someone who listens to music all day, and is always at the mercy of her flippant musical desires.

Today is a good one, though. Today is Portishead.

Portishead might be the perfect band for every occasion. Perfect when you’re sad and need to be uplifted, or when you’re sad and want to wallow. Perfect when you’re having a quiet drink with friends, or entertaining a special someone over dinner. Perfect for when you’re studying. Very perfect for when you’re studying.

I saw them a couple of years ago at Belvoir Amphitheatre. I think that venue may have been made for Portishead; the bush setting on a beautiful still night really complemented singer Beth Gibbons’ eerie vocals. I say every show is amazing, but it was really fantastic to see Portishead live, as they’re another band I just kind of assumed that I’d never get to see in concert. It was a brilliant show.

Here you go. Have some Numb, from the album Dummy.

Back to work.

A researcher’s life

1 Reply

BROWSER

 

This ought to say ‘The browser of a researcher’ because mine looks almost exactly like that. And I have two of them on the go.

I’m very over a lot of things at the moment and keeping quiet because otherwise I’ll just whinge. I’m over my thesis (I want it to be done!), over summer (why is Australia so frigging hot?), over being broke (’nuff said), over not having any time for myself because I’m always writing my thesis or working or sleeping (not enough).

So, lest I come across as unappreciative of the wonderful opportunities I have in this life, I’m going to keep my trap shut and buckle down, because I have a feeling that alleviating the thesis issue might help out with a couple of other issues.

Probably won’t be able to do much about the shitty stinking hot summer, though.

Late night study tunes: edn. XII [daytime version]

1 Reply

Today I’m going to finish a chapter. Today I’m going to finish a chapter. Today I’m going to finish a chapter…

merdenoms

So I’m turning to one of my favourite albums for motivation and inspiration. I really, really dig A Perfect Circle’s Mer de Noms. It was on constant rotation in my car CD player for about five years (back when I used to [a] own CDs and [b] listen to them in my car. Oh MP3s, how you changed everything).

I am a pretty massive fan of anything Maynard James Keenan does (but let’s not talk about Pusifer, who are rubbish). Tool are one of my favourite bands. I haven’t been as generally enthusiastic about everything A Perfect Circle did, but that’s possibly because I thrashed this album when it first came out, and for years afterwards. The same thing happened with Tool’s Undertow, but especially AEnima; I spent so long listening to those albums that it actually took me years to appreciate the two that followed. (Fun fact: I was 12 when AEnima was released. Woah!)

I really, really dig Mer de Noms. It’s the perfect mix of guitars and melodies and anger and beauty. That’s about as eloquent I can manage with my descriptions at the moment. You try reading existential philosophy for two weeks straight and coming up with anything better.

I hate posting a link to a video that was the lead/biggest single off an album because I feel like you (whoever “you” even are) will be like oh, she doesn’t really like the band, she just likes the single. But fuck it. Judith is just a really fucking cool song, and I run this city, so here it is:

Riddle me this, though: Why do so many women play bass (rather than other instruments) in bands? I feel like it perpetuates this idea that women are less accomplished/skilled/etc in rock bands, so they play bass because it’s “easy”. (I can’t play bass so it can’t be that easy. Then again I also can’t rock climb, so…)

It annoys me that she’s wearing heels, too, because it just doesn’t look comfortable, but I really enjoyed Maynard’s long dark wig phase, so I suppose that balances everything out.

In other somewhat related news, I’m going to see Tool in Melbourne in April. Yay! We got terrible seats (seats! blech!), but it should still be rather good. The trade off is that I’m no longer going to Coachella. With where my thesis is at, it would’ve been incredibly irresponsible of me to go traipsing around the world for a month, so I’m just going to the UK for a conference and then for a little mini-break in Paris. I sold my ticket to a lovely lady from Philly, and she seemed pretty happy, so all is well. I’ll get to Coachella one day.

On a side note, given that I also have a ticket to see Glen Hansard in Melbourne in March, I think the sooner I move there the better. Perth, you’re alright, but good lord. Get some gigs, please.

Turklism.

1 Reply

…on the networked computers of our everyday lives, people have compelling interactions that are entirely dependent upon their online self-representations. In cyberspace, hundreds of thousands, perhaps already millions, of users create online personae who live in a diverse group of virtual communities where the routine formation of multiple identities undermines any notion of a real and unitary self. Yet the notion of the real fights back. People who live parallel lives on the screen are nevertheless bound by the desires, pain, and mortality of their physical selves. Virtual communities offer a dramatic new context in which to think about human identity in the age of the Internet. They are spaces for learning about the lived meaning of a culture of simulation. Will it be a separate world where people get lost in the surfaces or will we learn how to see how the real and the virtual can be made permeable, each having the potential for enriching and expanding the other?

Sherry Turkle* was a big deal in Internet research in the 90s, and said some fairly sensible things alongside some pretty crazy things — but it wasn’t unusual for theory to be a bit crazy, back then.

The fear mongering over online communication is nothing now compared to what it was a decade or more ago. There was this real, pervasive sense of “the virtual” taking over online, with no room left for “the real”.

No one considered that virtual and real could be the same thing — or that virtual didn’t really exist (but rather that online was simply an extension of offline).

I’m battling with a very theory-heavy chapter at the moment, and whilst it’s inching its way towards finished, a handful of words at a time, I feel like I’m not making much headway, and hence blogging has been the last thing on my mind. Occasionally I (re)read passages like the above, though, and have to share them.

Most of the time, though, I just find myself becoming more and more confused by my own work, and that can’t be a good thing.

Sherry Turkle (1995) Life on the screen New York: Simon & Schuster

Realigned.

Leave a reply

20130212_094734

And almost a straight horizon! (Not bad seeing as I couldn’t actually see the image on my phone.)

This morning I went to the beach for the first time this year. Not so crazy, given that it’s only February, until you realise that I live less than five minutes drive from the ocean.

I’ve been feeling really off-kilter recently, but I think I was just burning out from too much thesiswriting. I took a couple of days off (not really on purpose; my brain just refused to cooperate and went into sleep mode) and have returned today feeling refreshed, mostly.

Anyway, back in to it. It’s one of those things, I think, that the closer you get, the further you feel from the finish line. It makes it very easy to lose perspective.

Things I’m quite sure are absolutely true.

Leave a reply

1. No matter how terrible service station coffee might normally be, it’s a perfectly acceptable option at 11pm when you’re setting in for what might be an all-nighter of thesis writing. It seems like all-nighters used to be so easy that they were de rigueur during undergrad. It’s funny how much more difficult they are when you’re ten years older and also have some semblance of a real, grown-up life to see to during the day. (I said some, mind. I’m still not really a grown up.)

20130205_232320

2. My dog is out of control cute. When I got back from my late night caffeine run (I bought Diet Coke too – pretty sure I’m going to need months to wean off caffeine after this thesis is done), he wouldn’t go back to bed until he’d got his favourite toy – a half-headless lion we affectionately call Mr Stinky because, well, he stinks – from the living room. Incidentally, Mucky (the dog) knows Mr Stinky by name. Clever? Maybe.

IMG_20130202_192637

3. Living with your parents a) as a person in their late 20s and b) whilst in the final months of your thesis is… interesting. Fact is that I couldn’t afford to live by myself at the moment — I was until June, it was too expensive — because rents in Perth are prohibitively expensive. More to the point, though, rents are expensive and the public transport isn’t great. I can handle paying $300+ for a studio or one bed apartment in another city (I guess? I’ve never done it), but in Perth it seems like an immense waste. Especially when the places up for rent are so scummy. Does that horrible blue carpet that every rental in the country seems to use come at some special landlords rate? Anywhere, there are only a handful of suburbs that I will live in/can afford to live in in Perth (due to the fact that Perth suffers from an immense urban sprawl, and if you’re too far out of the city there’s just no point, combined with the fact that if I live alone, I want to live somewhere I feel safe & surrounded by people), and the cheapest place going is $320 a week. Good thing I’m not looking. My last house cost $340 a week for a 2 bedroom with a massive yard :/ The idea of paying upwards of $350 a week to live in an apartment in Perth is just depressing. Seriously, there are studios in suburbs that double as urban rape dungeons going for $440+. In 2004, two friends and I payed $275 for a three bedroom, three story townhouse in Leederville. Those were the days.

So, I’m living with my parents. After I finish I plan to travel for a bit and then move interstate — or overseas, should an opportunity present itself. It’s cool, we mostly get along fine, and I know I’m a massive stresshead at the moment and sometimes that translates into bitch mode. It’s just slightly weird having to explain myself when I got for caffeine emergency drive at 11pm…! Fact is that 11pm isn’t really late for most people. I need the silence of the evening to work (and blog, clearly). Here are my folks in December on their 33rd (?) wedding anniversary. They probably won’t like me sharing this, but, too bad. I like it.

20121223_180304

Can you believe they’re old enough to have been married for 33 years and have almost-27 and almost-29 year old daughters? Me neither.

4. This article by Tara Brabazon scared the shit out of me and is perhaps part of the reason that I’m writing this long blog post right now instead of working. Some good advice, sure, but I think that’s what’s scaring me. By this stage I should probably have a really solid understanding of everything I’m writing about, but the fact that my thesis has developed so much in the past six months feels like I really have no choice but to gloss over some things … and I really worry that I’m misinterpreting key theorists/philosophies. I suppose that only time will tell. I really liked her points about not making vague, sweeping statements like “many researchers say…” or “much of the literature says…” without qualifying who and what has actually said whatever it is that I’m talking about. As I go through and edit I notice that that’s something I did a lot in the first couple of years, so it’s a matter of backtracking now and either changing the language, or finding sources to back up my generalising statements.

For some idiotic reason, I never used to reference as I wrote. I’d write pages and pages of text and then go back and reference afterwards. So stupid! A certain supervisor of mine cautioned me against this, oh, three years ago, and now that I’m fixing it I’m banging my head against the desk for not having referenced as I went in the first place. Which brings me to my final point for the evening…

5. Microsoft Word actually has a mind of its own. The amount of times that I’ve had to change my line spacing back from 1.5 to 2 lines, or to correct indented and hanging paragraphs just this evening is enough to send a person mad. I used OpenOffice from 2008 until September last year, when it just got too damn buggy* to bother with. When I got my new computer** I got Word, and it’s been great, for the most part, but it seems to be a glitchy little bastard at times. Also none of my Zotero citations carried over from OpenOffice to Word (and I have tried to go and fix them/change settings in OO) which is a pain in the butt.

Technology, right? Such a jerk.

*I’d totally recommend OpenOffice for anyone who likes an open source option, and isn’t the owner of an asshole computer. My old MacBook was a piece of junk from the day I bought it, and had to have numerous parts replaced – some more than once. I just don’t think it could handle OO. Towards the end I could only have one application open at a time, which is really not conducive to research at all.

**Curse the person who convinced me to buy a 21inch iMac instead of a 27inch one. The 21inch screen is good, but almost every day I wish I had the extra screen space. If you’re tossing up between them, get the bigger one. I think I was warned against it because the screen can get too much to watch from close range (i.e. too much eye movement), but seeing as I only use it for writing/reading/web rather than games, I think the bigger screen would’ve been fine.

Three things.

Leave a reply

20130205_155903

one. chapter structure changed, yet again. sigh. no titles for chapters yet. (you’ll notice at the bottom there’s one called instaflickrbook. don’t think i can really use that, sadly.)

20130205_155726

two. one of the few moments in the day that i’m not touching it. (gross.)

20130205_155306

three. desk and head from above. this is the level my boredom has reached.

no time to think serious-like. this week my thesis has given birth to a new (but necessary) chapter, so there is some major restructuring going on, and i can’t stop daydreaming about life post-thesis – a pretty common reaction when i start getting stressed. focus!